The Accident by Chris Pavone Read Free Book Online

truck.
    That, Isabel thinks, used to be me. Sort of. One of the flock of women who stream into luxurious gyms immediately after school drop-off, nine a.m. classes in Studio A, followed by bottled water and decaf skim lattes. The Exercising Class.
    Isabel walks a long block down Broadway, the early-morning world of Hispanic guys hosing down sidewalks, Twiggy-skinny girls walking minuscule dogs on whisper-thin leashes, scraggly-haired Japanese guys smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Taxis and Town Cars flying down the street, one after another, shuttling Uptowners to the Financial District.
    Her fatigue has created a sort of buzzing behind her temples, a background to the foreground of each of her steps, which she seems to hear not only in her ears but also in her chest, in her stomach, in the vibrations in her elbows as each footfall lands. She can’t tell if she’s walking slowly or quickly, normally or abnormally.
    She freezes on Broadway, aghast, about to step on a cat-size rat, lying belly-up in the middle of the sidewalk, in a pool of bright red blood; it must have just died. She feels a wave of nausea, with nothing but coffee and cigarette fumes in her stomach. She shivers, then continues walking down the street, one foot in front of the other.
    T he red awning beckons, the windows are warmly aglow, like a crackling fire in the gloomy hearth of sooty SoHo. A re-creation of a Parisian brasserie that’s so well executed that it has been copied in Paris.
    Isabel examines her reflection in one of these large windows. She pulls her hair back over her ear, and straightens her collar, and smooths the wrinkles out of her tight—too?—skirt. Here in the vague blur of a plate-glass window, she looks okay. It’s only up close, well-lit, that the truth reveals itself.
    She wends her way through the crowded room, past the Times and Journal s and Le Monde s scattered across tables, past tall men in dark suits and beautiful women in dark glasses. She arrives at the banquettes along the east wall, and reaches into her bag, and removes a thick stack of paper.
    Thud .
    Jeffrey jumps in his seat, looks up from his haphazardly folded newspaper, looks down again at the stack of manuscript that just landed on the tabletop. “Sunshine,” he says, smiling, “good day.” He tries to stand up, but he’s trapped under the lip of the table, so manages only to get into an uncomfortable-looking half-crouch, limbs fluttering.
    “Oh sit down.”
    He sinks back onto the leather bench with a shrug.
    Isabel drops her oversize tote, her manuscript bag, now a few pounds lighter, onto the floor. She glances around the restaurant, sees some familiar faces, a few casual acquaintances, and one very young, ambitious, and aggressively cleavaged colleague—rival, more accurately—named Courtney, a faithful soldier in the formidable army of fashionable females,girls with long bouncy layered blown-out hair and meticulously applied makeup, painstakingly accessorized wardrobes that are constantly updated, not just seasonally but monthly or even weekly, operating according to the precept that you should always wear the most expensive, most current item—jacket, handbag, haircut—that you can afford, or that you can pretend to afford.
    The irritating girl is meeting with a bright young editor who seems to be everywhere, all of a sudden. People who Isabel thinks of as assistants seem to have “senior” in their job titles, and books on bestseller lists. Meanwhile Isabel’s own cohort is receding from the front lines, chucking it all to go make goat cheese in Vermont, or disappearing for a few weeks during the worst of the chemo. Isabel has been startled by the vicissitudes of middle age.
    The editor waves at Isabel, while Courtney raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow, and flips her hair—she’s an incessant hair-flipper—but doesn’t alter the set of her mouth, the plastered-on toothy smile, one of those Midwestern mouths whose repose is a severe frown,